Crew
Director – Paul Feig, Screenplay – Rebecca Sonnenshine, Based on the Novel The Housemaid (2022) by Freida McFadden, Producers – Paul Feig, Laura Fischer & Todd Lieberman, Photography – John Schwartzman, Music – Theodore Shapiro, Visual Effects – Anibrain (Supervisor – Kamal Kumar Tiwari), Crafty Apes (Senior Supervisor – Dave Morley) & Plucky, Special Effects Supervisor – Devin Maggio, Production Design – Elizabeth Jones. Production Company – Hidden Pictures/Pretty Dangerous Pictures.
Cast
Sydney Sweeney (Millie Calloway), Amanda Seyfried (Nina Winchester), Brandon Sklenar (Andrew Winchester), Indiana Elle (Cece Winchester), Michele Morrone (Enzo), Elizabeth Perkins (Mrs Winchester), Amanda Joy Erickson (Suzanne), Megan Ferguson (Jilianne), Ellen Tamaki (Patrice)
Plot
Millie Calloway applies for a job as housemaid to Nina Winchester, the wife of successful tech entrepreneur Andrew Winchester. What Millie does not tell Nina is that she has just been released on parole from a ten-year jail sentence for murder and is living in her car, unable to find a job with her history. She is accepted for the position and moves in. Soon after doing so, she realises that Nina is mentally unbalanced, going on rampages, making plans and then abruptly saying otherwise and gaslighting Millie about it. Through it all, Andrew proves perfectly calm and reassuring and Millie cannot help but be attracted to his handsomeness. From the other woman around the area, Millie learns that Nina has a history of disturbed mental behaviour and had been incarcerated in an institution for trying to drown her daughter.
This is an adaptation of the novel The Housemaid (2022) by Freida McFadden. McFadden is a practicing doctor, who specialises in brain injury. She began publishing in 2013 and has produced 28 books to date, most of which fall into the thriller category. Among these, The Housemaid ended up being an international best-seller. McFadden has since written two sequels The Housemaid’s Secret (2023) and The Housemaid is Watching (2024).
I had read The Housemaid not long before I learned there was going to be a film. And hated it. The book had slick commercial packaging written all over it from the deliberate pacing – chapters of no more than five pages – to the easy, measured and never too complicated prose. And when it came to the big twist reversal, it shouted as something that was being blatantly manipulative to the point of unbelievable. It felt very much like a Gillian Flynn wannabe.
The film has been placed in the hands of Paul Feig, a former tv director who was behind the hit comedy Bridesmaids (2011) and some of Melissa McCarthy’s biggest solo vehicles – The Heat (2013) and Spy (2015). Feig previously ventured into genre material with the all-girl remake of Ghostbusters (2016), the Christmas fantasy Last Christmas (2019), The School for Good and Evil (2022) and Jackpot! (2024) set around a deadly lottery.
With Freida McFadden signed on as an executive producer, the film is extremely faithful to the book and replicates it on almost every beat. Perhaps the most noticeable differences I could detect is that Enzo the gardener has less of a prominence here – is largely a peripheral character of no importance. The death that comes at the end is also changed to be something more deliberate rather than accidental.
On screen, The Housemaid feels like a Psycho-Thriller that would have been made back in the 1960s by either Hammer Films or someone like William Castle. You could easily imagine it taking place as a British country mansion, shot in high contrast black-and-white by a Freddie Francis, or else Amanda Seyfried’s role being played by a Joan Crawford. The big twist the script hangs on would have been bread-and-butter for writers of the day like Jimmy Sangster.
Paul Feig does a merely adequate job with the thriller element. The film is slick, hits all the right beats in the places it is meant to, but also proves superficial. You can easily see the pieces of plot being moved into place once you know what is going on. I didn’t particularly hate the film, but felt that a director more used to dealing with thriller material would have done a much better job with it. Someone like a Hitchcock would have transformed this into something else altogether.
The other negative drawback of the film is the Sydney Sweeney factor. Sydney Sweeney seems to be everywhere at the moment and has become an It Girl. She has made appearances in some quite high-profile films of late with the likes of Eden (2024), Immaculate (2024) and Christy (2025). The media tends to celebrate such success as indicative of talent and that is a point where I sort of balk. In everything she does, Sweeney comes across with an expression that looks dopey – a heavily-lidded blankness where she gives the impression she doesn’t get what is going on. She does very little that varies from that and rarely ever presents any kind of emotion. She seems to trying a little more here – she smiles in a couple of shots – but little that varies from that blank-faced expression.
The rest of Sydney Sweeney’s popularity seems to be based almost entirely on her admittedly very impressive set of whoppers, which she seems to have out and on display in everything she does (as she also does here). You could almost entirely put most of her stardom down to the hot-blooded reaction to such. Unfortunately, this merely places Sweeney into the same category as impressive mammaries but not a lot else going on joke that Pamela Anderson used to be. Except for the fact that Sweeney seems to be being offered more high-profile roles than Anderson ever did.
You can’t help but think that the role of Millie would have been far better suited to an actress far better at portraying just a regular girl – one who comes into the show seeming dowdy and downbeaten by life and proceeds to blossom throughout. Sydney Sweeney seems incapable of portraying an ordinary girl hard done by life as anything that has not something that has been created by the costume department and is immediately forgotten about after token acknowledgement.
On the other side of the coin, Amanda Seyfried has a splendid time going full Psycho Biddy on us. When it comes to her [PLOT SPOILERS], I don’t think the major twist works any better in the film than it did in the book. You do get some of the explanation of events but at the end of the film, you come away wondering why Nina had to act like a crazy person to get her point across. It is a case of refrigerator logic where much of The Housemaid falls apart in terms of plausibility when you think about it in terms of its surprises being known. Even given all of the improbabilities, why does the daughter have to act cold and haughty as well?
Trailer here